This is what happens when the Guaire River, Caracas’s open air latrine, reaches the sea at Barlovento.
Many more where that came from.
Mr. Caribbean, meet Open Sewer. Open Sewer, Caribbean.
25 thoughts on “Mr. Caribbean, meet Open Sewer. Open Sewer, Caribbean.”
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Caracas Chronicles 
thats not a real picture,it can’t be.
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I’d love to hear what all those pseudo-bohemian, tree-hugging,”revolutionary”,che-guevara-t-shirt-wearing,pot-smoking,flower-eating young fellas i know here have to say about this.
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In fairness, it’s not necessarily possible to know how much of the muck is silt, general top-soil runoff after a hard rain. Stll, amazing set of images.
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Geography 101: that picture is NOT showing the Guaire river. The Guaire river never reaches the sea since it flows into the Tuy river —the actual one in the pic— which also carries its own wastewaters. In fact, that huge brownish taint is the result of contamination of many crooks and rivers —the entire Tuy basin.
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A picture that overstates and exaggerates the content of an article, that never happened before!
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Would be great to see a technical analysis of the water shown in that photo. Most of it could be just mud, right?
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The thing about these types of issues isn’t that they’re a direct consequence of Chávez, Chavismo and the Madness (I’m guessing it wasn’t much different in 1998, and the Magdalena River in Colombia looks the same), but rather that the Madness and the Incompetence make it pretty much impossible to start addressing the issues.
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I just added a comment with links to papers – already from 1990 and 1995 – describing the huge disaster we have there. I think the links are on queue for approval.
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ok it is not linked to chavismo. However, a lot of tree-hugging movements, have immediate slidarity to leftist governments…and well they have been 15 years in power, why they haven’t addressed this and other environmental issues? Maybe Capriles do not let them
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You should have said that it is important to know that the brown clouds people see in the pictures are normal, even the sharp line between brown sediment charged water masses and the blue sea water mass is just a strong contrast between density, temperature and salinity. That is just the way sediments are transported to the basin!, it is a natural process occurring in all river mouths in the planet! Heavier sediments, coarser sediment grains are harder to move by the river, therefore the stay closer to the coast (as the accumulations of trees and other stuff in the pictures), fine grain sediments travel in suspension clouds and are driven away by marine currents until the settle down very far away.
I am not saying the river is not contaminated, I just want to make clear that the brownish cloud is not pure contamination.
By the way, I have seen exactly the same pictures along time ago (more than a year ago I think), unfortunately I couldn’t find the link to where I found them.
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As several have pointed out, the silt clouds from a river mouth is a normal phenomena. Since Venezuela has had a particularly rainy year, the silt (and sewage) being transported to the Caribbean Basin is high right now.
However, if your flight path takes you over the low over river outfall (such as you see from the plane on the flight from Porlamar), you will be able to clearly see an excessive amount of floating garbage in the water.
Nevertheless, using “evidence” such as this against Chavismo is unwise, since it can so easily backfire. You can file photos such as this one for every major river in the world. Now, if we had some hard data for the water quality exiting La Guaira, that would be a different story.
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Now, if you want to report an environmental disaster, look no further than el Lago de Maracaibo…
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….or Lago de Valencia. Two monumental disasters.
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And to think the Guaire was supposedly going to be so clean, Chavez himself promised to bathe in it.
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Er, ah, …he did. And you know the rest…..
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But to determine how much of that is silt versus sewage, one would need closer investigation.
As others have pointed out, you can get similar scenes elsewhere in the world. Here are some images from Brazil which are more silt than sewage: Rio Negro- Amazon.
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The thing to note is not merely the colour of the waters as they enter the sea , its the fact that the raw waste and untreated sewage of millions of people pour into the Guaire as their only outlet and thereafter fill the waters of the Tuy river which flows out into the sea. The picture shown us is that of the point where the Tuy pours into the sea , so that even if part of the colour is due to natural silt flowing into the waters the important fact is that mixed with that silt are millions of particles of raw human sewage which contaminate the sea. I have no idea what harm it does nor what can be done to prevent such harm or whether the cost of preventing such harm justifies the sacrifice in resources which preventing such harm entails . Maybe the latter are the real issues to discuss.
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we’re not going to see anything on CC about opposition mayors and governors meeting with Maduro at Miraflores, are we?
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There is a difference between silt and shit, Quico. This is obviously silt and any solid excrement would have disolved by the time it reaches Barlovento.
Another misleading post from the founfer of CC.
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Arturo, you are AGAIN not going to respond to this. No sientes a veces asco de ti por tu falta de honestidad?
Here you can read a little bit about the heavy pollution in the Tuy river.
That is a study published almost 24 years ago. Now the situation is much much much worse. The only shit that seems to dissolve with time is your honesty and your intelligence.
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I may have to agree with you in this one… never imagined that I would ever agreed with a Chavista, specially one totally imbued in the fringe.
Misrepresentation of a situation, with a falsy picture in order to get attention to a an article that may be as accurate as the sighting of bigfoot in the moon is just not right…
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The picture might not mean much, but the truth is pretty clear: the very few scientific studies that have been carried out in that area – in the water there and in the water a few kilometres into the sea show a dangerously high level of BOTH organic and inorganic residues due to extremely high pollution levels in the Tuy river.
We are in 2013. The area was already heavily polluted in 1990-1998.
It is not like in the Middle Ages or even 150 years ago when you could expect faeces to just “delude”. The amount is just way too much. Already in the Low Lands in the Middle Ages you had signals like “don’t sh*t on Wednesdays in the river because water is taken for the brewery”. Now we are talking not just about human stuff but all kinds of chemicals, from home and from factories.
Meanwhile in countries such as Germany rivers and lakes and the coast are cleaner now than they were in 20, 50, 80 years.
My mother used to bathe in the Valencia Lake when she was a child. It was normal.
I have seen similar lakes in Germany and Switzerland now: people still do it and it’s safe.
The Chavista government has a plan to clean the river…just like it had a plan to construct a gas pipeline to Argentina.
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London is another good example of what can be done to clean up air and rivers . In the 50’s early 60’s London smog was something that might prevent you from finding your home because from the street you could not see your home except through a thick haze, and there was a species of trout peculiar to the thames river ( thames trout) which dissapeared from the middle lower part of the river because pollutants in it eat up the oxygen it needed to survive. The gov took smart measures to combat both and by the 70’s the smog disappeared and the first thames trout in ages was fished from the London bridge area . .
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If you are curious about this issue, take a look at that pre-Chávez paper on water pollution. There are several on line. You just google stuff like “pollution river Tuy sea coast” and the like…it doesn’t matter what colour the water takes
(although if you do look with Google Earth along our Venezuelan water bodies you will see some stuff that doesn’t look like silt…it looks like waves of oily material and high levels of particular plankton that grow particularly with high pollution levels – like in the Valencia Lake, in several water dams for human consumption – like El Pao -, along the coast of Morón, in many places of Maracaibo Lake)
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Shit does not disolve, Aruro it may get diluted … But Eschechia Coli (aka E. Coli) and other bacteria keep alive (vivitas y coleando) .. sea water does not kill them … Approximately 12.000 to 15.000 liters per second of white water flows in Caracas through Hidrocapital aqueducts and is sent to the sewer system with no type of waste water plant treatment … after reaching the Tuy river in Santa Teresa, it keeps flowing until the Paparo beach. Then currents carry it to Higuerote, Carenero and Los Totumos beaches (i would not bathe there unless you want a close encounter with E. Coli…)
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